Paula Vennells.

 Subject: Paula Vennells.

We rarely run our lives with the forensic intensity of an AI algorithm. We have off the cuff conversations, we have emotional and analytical changes of mind as we continually take in new information and start to reason differently as matters change.

Perhaps Chief Executives are paid so much money because they can form a line of reasoning and hold that line over decades as part of the boardroom stance.  If most of your utterance over decades had been recorded in minutes and in correspondence, including the more informal email then to pick a trail through these thousands of incidental conversations and executive directions is mind blowing especially if, as Chief you wear your personal hat as well as that of the company.

Listening to another day from Paula Vennels answering the drum beat of questions from Jason Beer KC as he pursues her memory of events one must remember he has had a team of legal beavers scoping word by word, line by line documents unearthed not only from the Post Office but also from emails written by interested parties concerning the postmaster/postmistress scandal. The callousness of the Postoffice legal team in pursuing individual postmasters we are asked to accept as, that’s what legal eagles do, they tear apart the words and the characters of those they are ‘employed’ to oppose and those at the top of the tree get very well paid for this service although there often seems very little recognition of the circumstances of the twisting of truth required at the time.

As CEO Paula Vennells’s  job was to run the PO, an ailing organisation, (jettisoned for that reason from the Royal Mail itself) back to health and report her activities to the Board. The specialities departments, Legal, Finance, Public Relations, Human Resources and most importantly in the issues surrounding the Horizon Computer system used to keep track of the Daily Cash transactions carried out by the staff within the Branch, the Dats Processing experts who monitor the computer system.

Her reliance on these departments for feedback is normal procedure in a large organisation and the harrying of Ms Vennells by barristers who if they cast their minds back to previous cases they have contended must blush to think of their involvement in skipping over an over the involvement when perusing a line of questioning of someone who had had hands on involvement of a crime.

And so the slight of this diminutively dressed woman has appeared each day in the bear pit of a televised kicking, for which no doubt she is responsible by having to wear two caps, one with responsibility for the success of the company to its shareholders and the other, as the most senior day to day executive who responsibility was also to the employees of the company. Of course she might argue that the postmasters/ postmistresses were in part independently self employed in the role they performed but in effect they were employees. Her testimony has been littered with claims “that I didn’t know “, “I should have asked”, or “I don’t recall” and it is for this obfuscation that she is challenged now. How could she say she didn’t know that uniquely, the PO were the prosecutor and judge and that the fault in the computer program was perhaps not a fault but the direct interference from an outside terminal which altered the balances and presented the postoffice staff with a fait accompli, that they balance the books with their own savings or face imprisonment.

She stands indicted at least with been incompetent but perhaps in turning the PO around from a large loss making organisation to one which was making reasonable profits is what her employers employed her for, including incidentally  the only shareholder, the government, that of healing a sick organisation.

The prosecutions of post office staff  were in clear view as was their inability to question the veracity of the evidence in court. Where are the executives of Fijusi the company who owned and designed the computer to have a back door by which financial transactions could be altered. Where are the judges and the barristers who proclaimed a crime had been committed when all paths led to the malfunctioning of the Horizon program.

Instead we haven’t thrown off our penchant for the stocks in the market square where innocents and those guilty could be used for the public indulgence in bashing the weak.

Of course the enquiry only highlights the divisions in our society.

I well remember my shock in having the scales removed from my eyes on returning to this country, of the indifference given towards sectors within our society, between the bosses and the workers, between those who feel they are in control and those who are controlled. There’s a schism running through our society, ‘a them and us’ mentality and nothing more illustrates this than the Post Office expose.